neadods: (Default)
neadods ([personal profile] neadods) wrote2005-06-16 11:00 am
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Lingual neepery

I'm on Lecture #9 of the history of English and still digging it. Fascinating - he had a lecture on the words that were imported/imposed from Norman English, and also on the remaining uses of inflection in English. (In that the same word has different meaning and pronunciation depending on how it is used. I record the data. I play my old record.)

For the complete language geek, this is the ToC for the supplementary material for Part 1. I'm pulling it off the web as the sources are mentioned. Note that lectures 1-6 were about how one studies language and Indo-European roots and didn't have cited readings.

Lecture #7: Old English: The Anglo-Saxon Worldview
- Caedmon’s Hymn
Lecture #8: Changing Language: Did the Normans Really Conquer English?
- Peterborough Chronicle, 1135
Lecture #9: Conquering Language – What Did the Normans do to English?
- The Owl and the Nightingale (1st 14 lines)
- Peterborough Chronicle, 1087
- Harley’s Lyrics
Lecture #10: Chaucer’s English
- Canterbury Tales, General Prologue
- Chaucer’s Reeves Tale
- Chaucer’s Second Shepherd’s Play
Lecture #12: Medieval Attitudes toward Language Change and Variation
- Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde

If there's any uberhistory geek who can point me to the entire Peterborough Chronicle (aka Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) online in the original text, please do so. The 1135 cite was the end of four citations showing the lingual shift of the phrase "in the year" but I could only find 1135 in the original Old English.

FYI, part 2 will take us through Shakespearean English, the Great Vowel Shift, and "Amerlish" hiving off from the mother tongue, so there will be lots of references pulled offline from Shakespeare, the KJV and the writings of the Founding Fathers. Part 3 will lean heavily on American dialect, as far as I can tell.

Re: Remember that other one I told you about?

[identity profile] neadods.livejournal.com 2005-06-16 05:48 pm (UTC)(link)
I did.

If you want, you can rent mine when I've gone through it. CDs, the textbooks (when they arrive from half.com and I've read them) and the supplemental readings I'm pulling off the web.

Re: Remember that other one I told you about?

[identity profile] tchwrtr.livejournal.com 2005-06-16 08:39 pm (UTC)(link)
You SO have me wanting to borrow/rent your copy of this...